1. Field of Invention
The invention relates to a multi-mode image processing method and its corresponding system that can be applied to line art, gray-level and colors image processing.
2. Related Art
A normal electronic graphics file is comprised of pixels. An image file is displayed by thousands up to millions of arrayed pixels. Computers use one of several bits of data combinations to record the brightness and colors of each pixel. The more bits there are in image data, the more stored information there is in the file, which of course occupies a lot of memory. Images according to their storage methods can be classified into three basic types: line art images, gray-level images and colors images.
For line art images, each pixel is recorded using one bit, indicating whether the pixel is black or white. This type of images is usually used in OCR (Optical Calligraphy Recognition). Halftone images use black-and-white images to generate an approximate effect to the gray-level images. In this case, a darker area contains more black dots, while a brighter area contains less. Therefore, images with different gray levels can be produced in this way. Most of the pictures seen in newspapers belong to this type of halftone images.
Each pixel in a gray-level image takes more bits. For example, 4 bits are needed to present 16 gray levels. Similarly, 8 bits can represent 256 gray levels so that the black-and-white pictures become more realistic.
Colors images contain more complicated data than line art and gray-level images. To obtain colors images, digital cameras and scanners split colors in an image (e.g., RGB colors) to analyze the light received from an object. Through this operation, all colors in the image can be reproduced by mixing the RGB colors in different proportions. As the selected modes differ, the color-recording limit can be 24-bit, 30-bit or even 36-bit RGB pixels.
In practice, a single object often contains more than one image feature. For example, a newspaper contains line art images for texts, gray-level images for classified ads, and colors images for pictures. The photo part of a driver ID is a colors image, while the other parts are either line art or gray-level images. When making name cards, one often needs to simultaneously process the colors images for photo pictures, line art images for texts and gray-level images for trademarks.
There are several processing methods in the prior art: one is to process everything in colors images. One merit is that there is a lot of information for the image so that it can mimic the true image. Nevertheless, the drawback is that it needs a huge amount of memory and requires along processing time. A second method is to process in line art or gray-level images. One advantage of this is that it requires less memory and a shorter processing time. But the drawback is that one loses some image information and the image cannot be truly reproduced.
In view of the foregoing, the invention provides a multi-mode image processing method and its system. It uses line art, gray-level, and colors multiple modes to capture, edit and store image information.
The invention uses an image capture device to capture a preliminary colors image. An image analyzing device separates the preliminary colors image into line art image areas, gray-level image areas, and colors image areas. The image capture device captures an advanced line art image, an advanced gray-level image, and an advanced colors image. Users can obtain the advanced line art image, the advanced gray-level image, and the advanced colors image by selecting the line art image areas, the gray-level image areas, and the colors image areas, respectively, from the existing image shown by an image display device. An image storage device stores the multi-mode image information in a multi-mode image file.
The disclosed multi-mode image capture and storage method includes the steps of: capturing a preliminary image, analyzing image information, capturing an advanced image, and storing image information.
The disclosed multi-mode image editing and storage method includes the steps of: capturing an existing image, displaying a preliminary image, editing image information, and storing image information.
The disclosed multi-mode image editing and storing system includes: an image display device, an input device, and an image storage device.
An object of the invention is to use line art, gray-level, and colors multiple modes to capture, edit, and store image information.